The Physics of It

You are presumably at least some manner of rider of a bicycle if you are reading this publication. I’ve been riding bikes since the Triassic. All kinds. The flowered banana seat kind my dad pushed me away on, big sister’s too-big road bike, 40 pound fully rigid Nishiki mountain bike, gravel bike (dumb), e-mtn bike (rad!)–the gamut. I’m okay at bikes. 

And still…at the strangest, unprovoked moments, I’ll be riding along–doo-pee-doo, sha-la-la–and I’ll be full-body-seized by the physical absurdity of it. As if I snapped out of a daydream or a trance to find I’m flying a plane. I don’t fly planes. The physics of the thing just suddenly cracks my brain. How is this working? What if it stops?

And it’s not like I’m the kind of person who must know how a thing works. I muse on the internal mechanism of a clock, a derailleur–the ‘why’ of a wheel–exactly never. Some trail bro will ride up alongside and say “Hey, great tread pattern. Is that the Maxxis DynoRaptorHooHa?” and I not only have no idea, but also wonder if this line works on other women. 

I’ve heard there’s no mathematical equation that explains how a bike works. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it sounds right. I have a friend who has a PhD in math, so I asked her. She looked at me like I had asked “So, like, if I drop this Clif bar, will it then be on the ground? Are Twinkies smart?” Her response could either mean ‘of course there is, you dipshit’ or ‘of course there isn’t, you dipshit.’ She’s a little cagey that way. Also, when there’s a large group of us out to dinner and we try to make her figure out the bill, cuz=Math Whiz, she rolls her eyes and pulls out Splitwise. 

In other random and unrelated news, sometimes at a stoplight, one foot on the ground, one clipped in (no track standing here…), I will think to myself “what if this light never changes.” And it’s not that I wonder if the mechanism is broken, it’s more of an existential thing, like what if it doesn’t have the chance to change because: a) alien invasion, b) black hole swallowing event, c) massive coronary, although I do understand that item c), massive coronary doesn’t stop the light from changing, but for me it does, so, you know, same-same. 

So, I still don’t know if there is or is not a mathematical equation that explains how a bicycle works, and frankly, if there was, I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. Previously referenced PhD friend could draw “7*99\@}}=565 Flux Capacitor” and I’d be like “wow. You are so smart.” and then go back to doing my nails and never think about the math of bikes again. I of course asked the internet if there was such an equation, and it was like “of course there is/isn’t, you dipshit.”